JEFFERSONIAN CHRISTIANITY

JEFFERSONIAN CHRISTIANITY

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

  Thomas Jefferson was one of our most influential founders of the USA. Some tout him as a Christian, whereas he was a confirmed deist and naturalist with strong view of the “Christian system”.

  “Deism is essentially the view that God exists, but that He is not directly involved in the world. Deism pictures God as the great “clockmaker” who created the clock, wound it up, and let it go. A deist believes that God exists and created the world, but does not interfere with His creation. Deists deny the Trinity, the inspiration of the Bible, the deity of Christ, miracles, and any supernatural act of redemption or salvation. Deism pictures God as ambivalent, uncaring, and uninvolved. Thomas Jefferson was a famous deist, referring often in his writings to “Providence.”  http://www.gotquestions.org/deism.html  

  In his later years, using cutthroat razor and paste, he selectively cobbled together from the 4 gospels what is referred to and still published for sale today as the Jefferson Bible. Interestingly, past and present elected officials, including congressmen, senators, and presidents, a number of them openly professing Christianity, chose to swear oath of office with hand upon old Jeff’s book.

  As a practicing deist and naturalist Jefferson carefully included moral teachings of Jesus but excluded mention of miracles, at times slicing accounts in portions including Jesus wise words but excluding contextual miraculous event.

  There are numerous professing Christians since and currently that are of Jeffersonian stripe; selectively deciding when Lord Jesus Christ speaks truth and when He does not. I hear them and read their words:      

  “There is no virtual eternal hell. Life here is hell.”  (Mt.5:29-30; 10:28; 11:23; 16:18; 23:15, 33; Mk.9:43-48; Lk.10:15; 12:5; 16:23)

  “Demons don’t exist. They are figment of imagination, the explanation of mental health problems.” (Lk.4:33; 8:31)

  “Jesus is just one way to get to heaven. There are other ways.” (Jn.11:25; 14:6)

  “God is God whatever He is called, Allah, whatever.” (Deut.4:35; 6:4; Jn.1:18; 20:28; Eph.4:6; 1Tim.2:5; Jam.2:9)

  Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams dated October 13, 1813, wrote “In extracting the pure principles which he [Jesus] taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of … or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible  

  I leave you this morning with other than Jeffersonian naturalist deistic belief: “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” (KJV Isa.40:8) Here I stand.  EBB4